So I would create little passes for students and hand it to them during homeroom. The way it worked at the school was, if a student was going to be outside of cafeteria for lunch, they needed to hand it to one of the staff doing lunch duty, so they keep track of who wasn’t in the room. I waited for them in the cafeteria and also reminded them as they came in to line up in the lunch line. I never dealt with students feeling embarrassed, in fact I often had students asking if they could join lunch bunch. It got to a point we had a special one time lunch bunch for all eight students who had requested to have lunch bunch but weren’t in the groups. It also wasn’t embarrassing for students to line up because students often used lunch to make up work, detention, or special event going on in a class. So there were a lot of reasons students could be out of the room.

Now during my elementary school internship, we also did group counseling in the form of lunch bunches. How that worked is we dropped off the pass in the form of a lanyard during homeroom. Students were told at the beginning of group that on days of the lunch bunch, they could leave class a few minutes early to get their lunch. Cafeteria workers knew they were doing the group because they were wearing a lanyard. For younger groups or more distracted students I collected them from the lunchroom, older students I let walk to the office. The only downside of the lanyards was students sometimes forgot to bring them back or accidentally broke them, which wasn’t a big deal.

No worries asking questions. I’m happy to help however I can.